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Tag Archive: stay at home dad

Nov 23

My Kids Are Growing Up So Fast

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My Kids Are Growing Up So Fast

It’s almost that time. My last child is getting too old for naps and that special time I had with him, snuggling up in the afternoon is finally going to be gone. My favorite part of parenting has always been that feeling of a child curling up on my chest or snuggling next to me and then going to sleep. I don’t know how else to explain it except that it feels like a perpetual hug. At the risk of losing my “Man” card, I wish they could stay little for a lot longer.

My kids are growing so fast. The triplets will be seven in January.

Rose is already wearing some of my wife’s old clothes. She wears Shannon’s t-shirts as jammies and some of her old blouses with a belt or something around the waist. She’s starting to look long and beautiful, a real little lady.

Joseph is no longer the Thomas the Tank Engine loving kid he used to be. Now he’s all about jet airplanes and robotics. I build electronic circuit projects with him and he actually understands what’s going on.

Michael is our little book worm. He reads very well and takes after his mother as far as smarts go. He will be the brainiac of the three.

All of this is cool. It’s amazing to watch them grow and mature. When I first saw it happening in them I comforted myself with, “Well, I still have Matthew for a while longer.”

Now that’s going away too.

He wants to be like his older siblings so badly that he tries to do everything they do. Sometimes he succeeds but mostly it just ends in frustration. It’s very cute to watch, we comfort him and it all works out. He throws the most tantrums but I understand where it comes from. And I see in his eyes the understanding he is acquiring about everything around him and he doesn’t want to be little anymore. At four and a half he’s done with baby toys, tricycles, training wheels and will start t-ball sooner than I can imagine.

Regularly, someone I’m talking to will say, “Hey, pretty soon your littlest one will be going off to Kindergarten and you’ll have all of them in school full time. Wow, you’ll enjoy that!”

I just wish they’d shut up.

Tags: Children, Growing Up, Kids, Life, Mommy Daddy, stay at home dad

3 comments

Jul 23

This Kind Of Thing Only Happens To Me

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Life

by Mommy Daddy

This Kind Of Thing Only Happens To Me

The other day my wife was painting the boys’ room, one of her yearly summer projects while not teaching. I was working too, so we were both tired and since neither of us wanted to cook, I went out for fast food.

When I go out for fast food it usually requires more than one stop because my kids like the kiddy meals with the prizes, my wife likes the onion rings at a certain other restaurant and I pop into another for Chinese takeout. It’s no big deal because all of these places are in the same shopping center right next to each other. Riverside is like that, classic suburbia, every strip mall has a dry cleaners, a yogurt shop, several fast food joints and Chinese food.

So, I go there, park the car, go into each restaurant..1,2,3…I’m done. I’m on my way back to the car, laden down with fast food bags, when a guy pulls up next to me on his bicycle. He’s a very casually dressed kind of guy and strapped onto the handlebars, in front, is a big box and he says…

“Excuse me sir, but I’m trying to make extra money…Would you like to buy some antlers?”

I stop dead in my tracks, digest what he just said, look around to see if I’m on camera and then look in the box. Sure enough- it’s full of antlers. There were deer antlers in it, what looked like a ram’s horn and other racks that I couldn’t identify.

I looked up into a face that was full of anticipation and said, “No, I’m good.”

“Well, thanks”, he said, “You have a nice day.” And he pedaled off and that was that.

This kind of thing only happens to me.

Tags: Life, REALLY strange stuff, stay at home dad, Strange Stuff, Writing

3 comments

Jun 18

The Way We Were

Categories:

Life

by Mommy Daddy

The Way We Were

I just got done watching a couple of old episodes of the TV show “Taxi” with my wife. I Netflixed season four. I used to watch it all the time growing up but my wife wasn’t too familiar with it. God I loved that show. All those actors early in their careers, some broke out and others didn’t. And nobody, nobody was better on that show than Reverend Jim Ignatowski.

As we watched the show I noticed a lot of differences in TV from back then versus today. Pacing was a lot slower, the quality of the writing was different, not better just … different. I also remembered how different it was back then just watching a TV program.

To say it was a different experience to watch TV is a total understatement. There were only three networks and one through thirteen actual VHF channels on a rotary dial channel changer. The UHF dial actually tuned in the UHF TV stations like a radio tuning dial on our old TV set. There was no cable, just rabbit ear antennas on top of the set and another antenna on your roof if you needed it.

There weren’t many VCRs so you actually planned your schedule around TV. If you missed an episode of your favorite TV show, you missed it; no going back. The only time you could see it again would be summer reruns. It was such a big deal!

I remember being in a different room of the house and suddenly hearing the theme song of a favorite TV show, on the only TV we had, come drifting through the air from the family room. I’d drop everything and go racing through the house and get there before the theme song ended. In those days they actually played the whole thing and the shows had totally original theme songs that had a lot to do with the style and feel of the TV show. No one borrowed famous rock songs for a show. The songs were an important part of the success of that show. Could you imagine shows like “MASH”, “The Rockford Files” or “All In The Family” with any other theme songs?

Once in the family room I had to jockey for position on the couch or find an unoccupied place on the floor. I came from a big family. Commercials actually served a purpose back then, you took care of business during the breaks; snacks or going to the bathroom.

Television also marked the passing of time. Christmas specials, like “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” for Halloween, actually marked certain points in my yearly schedule. Summertime was full of reruns and the anticipation of the new fall TV schedule. They even had TV specials with samples of the new, upcoming shows or Saturday morning cartoon shows.

After comparing experiences as kids, my wife and I started to think about how kids watch TV now. Basically, everything is at their fingertips. If they want to see anything, they can. No build up. No anticipation. It’s all immediate gratification. My six year olds have probably seen Rudolf twenty times already. When I was six I had seen it a grand total of two times.

TV isn’t an experience anymore, it’s the equivalent of a tissue. You need one, you get one, you blow your nose and then you toss it.